I OUGHT not to offer a record of these days, interests, recuperations, without including a certain old, well-thumbd common-place book,1 filled with favorite excerpts, I carried in my pocket for three summers, and absorbd over and over again, when the mood invited. I find so much in having a poem or fine suggestion sink into me (a little then goes a great ways) prepard by these vacant-sane and natural influences.

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent.Epictetus.

Victor Hugo makes a donkey meditate and apostrophize thus:

My brother, man, if you would know the truth,

We both are by the same dull walls shut in;

The gate is massive and the dungeon strong.

But you look through the key-hole out beyond,

And call this knowledge, yet have not at hand

The key wherein to turn the fatal lock.

William Cullen Bryant surprised me once, relates a writer in a New York paper, by saying that prose was the natural language of composition, and he wonderd how anybody came to write poetry.

Farewell! I did not know thy worth;

But thou art gone, and now tis prized:

So angels walkd unknown on earth,

But when they flew were recognized.Hood.

John Burroughs, writing of Thoreau, says: He improves with agein fact requires age to take off a little of his asperity, and fully ripen him. The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and accepteronly it likes him farther off.

Louise Michel at the burial of Blanqui, (1881.)

Blanqui drilld his body to subjection to his grand conscience and his noble passions, and commencing as a young man, broke with all that is sybaritish in modern civilization. Without the power to sacrifice self, great ideas will never bear fruit.

Out of the leaping furnace flame

A mass of molten silver came;

Then, beaten into pieces three,

Went forth to meet its destiny.

The first a crucifix was made,

Within a soldiers knapsack laid;

The second was a locket fair,

Where a mother kept her dead childs hair;

The thirda bangle, bright and warm,

Around a faithless womans arm.

A mighty pain to love it is,

And tis a pain that pain to miss;

But of all pain the greatest pain,

It is to love, but love in vain.

Maurice F. Egan on De Guerin.

A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he,

He followd Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighd,

Till earth and heaven met within his breast:

As if Theocritus in Sicily

Had come upon the Figure crucified,

And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest.

And if I pray, the only prayer

That moves my lips for me,

Is, leave the mind that now I bear,

And give me Liberty.Emily Brontë.

I travel on not knowing,

I would not if I might;

I would rather walk with God in the dark,

Than go alone in the light;

I would rather walk with Him by faith

Than pick my way by sight.

Prof. Huxley in a late lecture.

I myself agree with the sentiment of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, that the scope of all speculation is the performance of some action or thing to be done. I have not any very great respect for, or interest in, mere knowing, as such.

Prince Metternich.

Napoleon was of all men in the world the one who most profoundly despised the race. He had a marvellous insight into the weaker sides of human nature, (and all our passions are either foibles themselves, or the cause of foibles.) He was a very small man of imposing character. He was ignorant, as a sub-lieutenant generally is: a remarkable instinct supplied the lack of knowledge. From his mean opinion of men, he never had any anxiety lest he should go wrong. He venturd everything, and gaind thereby an immense step toward success. Throwing himself upon a prodigious arena, he amazd the world, and made himself master of it, while others cannot even get so far as being masters of their own hearth. Then he went on and on, until he broke his neck. [back]